Spirent Communications
Providing CLEAR DevOps Solution for Continuous Testing and Lab Management

Today, development teams are under increasing pressure from customers to work more collaboratively together with operations teams to accelerate product delivery pipelines. Though DevOps thrives to overcome and address these complexities, lack of expertise on implementation and usage of DevOps solutions is posing as a problem for organizations that are employing DevOps.

“DevOps is about rapid build, test and delivery cycles. The faster you can test and identify a problem in the delivery pipeline, the faster you can fix it. DevOps and Continuous Testing based on process knowledge and tools designed to accelerate testing, can help organizations identify gaps in their current practice and get more value out of DevOps,” says Marc Hornbeek, Senior Solutions Architect, Spirent Communications.

Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, Spirent develops innovative solutions that allow IT and communications industries to evaluate the performance, agility, and security of the latest technologies, infrastructure, and applications being deployed worldwide. Even though historically Spirent’s applications have been focused on the network arena, the space is now broadening out toward enterprise applications deployed virtual and cloud environments.

“We believe DevOps is becoming increasingly important as organizations are migrating toward elastic cloud computing resulting in additional testing as more deployments are pushed through the delivery pipeline,” adds Hornbeek. Spirent's test and lab automation solutions efficiently evaluate performance of the latest technologies as DevOps implementations trend towards speed and faster deployments of software. As new communication services and applications are introduced in the market, Spirent provides the solutions to help companies get their offerings tested and to the market faster.

Spirent’s CLEAR DevOps Solution includes tools, expertise, and professional services. Two of Spirent’s solutions instrumental in implementing DevOps are iTest, a vendor agnostic, integrated test authoring and automated test executing tool and Velocity, an integrated lab management and test execution solution for self-service elastic test labs.

“In context of testing and DevOps, it is important to have a fully-integrated tool kit that embodies a test methodology where one does not have to spend time shifting tools or wasting time creating and maintaining tests. iTest and Velocity create a powerful, integrated toolset that integrates into existing or new DevOps environments,” explains Patrick Johnson, General Manager, Spirent.

One of the clients of Spirent, in spite of having a proper infrastructure of rich software application, was facing unyielding engineering performance. The organization was unable to meet their committed release dates and was struggling to keep pace with new feature requirements due to 50 percent of engineering working on customer found defects. By moving to a continuous testing test methodology using Spirent’s CLEAR DevOps Solution, they were able to free up engineering and lower the overall cost of quality assurance. The savings to development provided a payback on the solution in the first year and enable the customer to move from 18 months to monthly releases. Spirent’s DevOps model, optimized the customers continuous build and automation testing cycle environment enabling them to scale test automation to over 600 developers. Spirent CLEAR DevOps Performance Dashboard enabled the entire operation to monitor the performance of the new continuous integration infrastructure in real-time. By doing so, the client was able to benchmark the current state and systematically monitor infrastructure to guide teams and individuals on achieving their goals and objectives for continuous deployment.

We help the organizations to identify gaps in their current practice and what they should do to get more value out of DevOps

Going forward, Spirent aims to bring more advanced continuous testing product features to market and advance their array of expert services for DevOps. “We have built a product structure for the growing cloud environment, which allows customers to spin up and manage testing and labs remotely in cloud,” concludes Hornbeek.